Soups of Hunters, Fishers, …

…and hopefully gatherers someday.

As the name suggests, it is choc full of seafood from fish to a range of shellfish including prawns, crabs, periwinkles, snails, clams and more.

Nigerian fisherman’s soup is the retain of the Niger Delta region.

According to Iquo Ukoh in her book, Memories on a Platter, “this is one soup that regular fishermen will cook whilst at the seaports after their day’s catch.”

It is often thickened using a starchy consideration – garri, pounded yam, or cocoyam, sometimes with okro.

I’m forever seeing threads of connection across a extent of foods and drinks, practices, and more.

My hope is that in future, I might identify a soup using historical ties and records that associate it to gathering, and foraging.

Although doing some investigation for a piece on spices, I came across English Poacher’s Soup and it made me think of hunting and game. And that made me consider of Nigerian Fisherman’s Soup, and how fisherpeople would use portion of their catch to produce the soup. I’m not delving detailed into all three now but here are my notes on two of the three, for which recipes exist.

And then my thoughts went to hunting and gathering, and I wondered what the equivalent soup for gatherers would be called, and if it existed.

It is also similar to Rivers Native Soup.

Named for the ingredients, the bulk of which is game, or wild-caught meat, Poacher’s soup, according to Elisabeth Aryton in The Cookery of England (1977) first came to people knowledge in the 19th century. At the time, laws about game and hunting were “in force unreformed” and so there would have been no people admission of the dishes preparation or existence.

In Anne Cobbett’s The English Housekeeper: Or, Manual of Domestic Control (1851), there is a recipe which uses “any type of game”:

Like this set.

If you recognize any recipes, please point me to them.

Season the meat with such combined spices as you like, then flour and fry it in the frying-pan, or put them, at once, into the strained stock, for the frying process is not actually essential. Simmer till the meat be tender.

This strong soup may be made of any classify of game. This may be enriched by wine, catsup, anchovies, and forcemeat balls.

On 4 lbs. of any of the coarse parts of venison, beef, or the same weight in shanks, or lean mutton, for the stock; boil in it celery, onions, carrots, turnips, what herbs you like, and ¼ oz. of combined black and Jamaica peppers. Simmer three hours, then strain it. Put in using the pieces of meat, about 10 compact onions, 2 heads of celery cut up, and 6 peeled potatoes; when the stock comes to a boil, add a compact white cabbage, or a lettuce quartered, black pepper, salt, and allspice if you like. If the meat be composed of small birds, the vegetables must be put into the soup and cooked in advance of the meat, for that must not be overdone. Skin and cut up a black cock, a woodcock, a pheasant, half a hare, a rabbit, a brace 108of partridges, or grouse, or slices of venison; any one, or parts of several of these, according to what you may require and what game you may have.